What? Was man made a wheel-work to wind up,And be discharged, and straight wound up anew?No! grown, his growth lasts; taught, he neer forgets;May learn a thousand things, not twice the same. Robert BrowningA Death in the Desert. L. 447.

It is not growing like a treeIn bulk, doth make man better be;Or standing long an oak, three hundred year,To fall a log at last, dry, bald, and sere: A lily of a day Is fairer far in May,Although it falls and die that nightIt was the plant and flower of Light. Ben JonsonPindaric Ode on the Death of Sir H. Morison.

Arts and sciences are not cast in a mould, but are found and perfected by degrees, by often handling and polishing, as bears leisurely lick their cubs into shape. MontaigneApology for Raimond Sebond. Bk. II. Ch. XII.

Oh! what a vile and abject thing is man unless he can erect himself above humanity. Here is a bon mot and a useful desire, but equally absurd. For to make the handful bigger than the hand, the armful bigger than the arm, and to hope to stride further than the stretch of our legs, is impossible and monstrous . He may lift himself if God lend him His hand of special grace; he may lift himself by means wholly celestial. It is for our Christian religion, and not for his Stoic virtue, to pretend to this divine and miraculous metamorphosis. MontaigneEssays. Bk. II. Ch. XII.

Post id, frumenti quum alibi messis maximastTribus tantis illi minus reddit, quam obseveris.Heu! istic oportet obseri mores malos,Si in obserendo possint interfieri. Besides that, when elsewhere the harvest of wheat is most abundant, there it comes up less by one-fourth than what you have sowed. There, methinks, it were a proper place for men to sow their wild oats, where they would not spring up. PlautusTrinummus. IV. 4. 128.